Professor Paul Goldstein Wins 2013 Harper Lee Prize For Legal Fiction

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STANFORD, Calif., July 15, 2013 – The ABA Journal and the University of Alabama School of Law today announced that Stanford Law School’s Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law, Paul Goldstein has received the third annual Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for his book Havana Requiem. The prize, named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill A Mockingbird, is awarded each year to a novel that best exemplifies the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change. It is sponsored by the ABA Journal and the University of Alabama School of Law and includes John Grisham and Michael Connelly as previous winners.

Havana Requiem focuses on Intellectual Property Attorney Michael Seeley and his attempt to help a group of Cuban jazz musicians reclaim the copyright to their work that had been granted to music publishers for a fraction of their current value.

Goldstein notes the similarities between Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird andHavana Requiem. “There are striking parallels between the issue of race in Atticus Finch’s South of over a half-century ago, and Castro’s Cuba today. It’s no coincidence that all but one of my hero Michael Seeley’s composer clients in Havana are Afro-Cubans, nor that the threat their music presents to Cuba’s white, totalitarian regime is one of the book’s central themes,” Goldstein says.

Havana Requiem is the third book in Goldstein’s series of legal thrillers featuring the character of Michael Seeley. His previous two books include Errors and Omissions and A Patent Lie.

In addition to his writing, Goldstein serves as of counsel at Morrison & Foerster in their intellectual property group and has been regularly included in Best Lawyers in America. He has served as chairman of the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Panel on Intellectual Property Rights in an Age of Electronics and Information, has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright, and Competition Law in Munich, Germany, and was a founding faculty member of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center.

This year’s panel of judges for the award included bestselling authors, Michael Connelly and Richard North Patterson; syndicated talk show host Katie Couric; Morris Dees, co-founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Dr. Sharon Malone, physician and sister of the University of Alabama alumna Vivian Malone Jones, one of the first two African Americans admitted and first to graduate from the University of Alabama.